No, I didn't define what I meant with "REST" elsewhere. I really had only two goals when starting this:

1. Make "pretty" url's
2. Have separate handlers for the HTTP verbs or methods

The fact that I'm having trouble accomplishing #1 (i.e., unable to hack mod_rewrite sufficiently that index.pl is hidden, or even that it depends on mod_rewrite) is frustrating but minor. From the reading I've done on REST, handling the HTTP verbs differently is pretty important, and I think this approach does it pretty well.

On the value of "pretty" url's, I've recently been thinking that having a url-mapping for functionality within a web application is a useful tool to organize the application.

The biggest drawback I see with my implementation is the extra code you'd have to write (as opposed to "configure" in the url-mapping) to differentiate content-types, e.g.:

# somewhere in a Renderer subclass...
sub POST {
  my $self = shift;
  my $filename = $self->cgi->param('file');
  my $type = $self->cgi->uploadInfo($filename)->{'Content-Type'};
  if ( $type eq 'text/html' ) {
    # do something with the HTML
  }
  elsif ( $type eq 'image/gif' ) {
    # do something with the GIF
  }
  # ...
}
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